He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Trying to iron out all the ways animals sense the earth’s magnetic field, researchers have managed to overturn a “widely held view” about the functioning of certain photoreceptor molecules:

…states Dr. Reppert, “the finding provides the first genetic evidence that a vertebrate-like (photoreceptor molecule) can function as a magnetoreceptor.”

An interesting feature of the team’s work disproved a widely held view about how these proteins can chemically sense a magnetic field.

In your face!!

“These findings suggest that there is an unknown photochemical mechanism that the (photoreceptor molecules) use instead,” says Dr. Gegear, lead author on the paper, “one that we are hotly pursuing.”

Mission: tag and bag all unknown photochemical mechanisms.

Holy crap - they’ve reconstructed the colors of the feathers running down a dinosaur’s back:

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

…
“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

…

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

This is something like a holy dinosaur grail being discovered.

The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”

Didn’t think of that in 1960.

Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.

For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.

“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”

Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.

Source of much amusement here at Gonzo HQ.

Scientists have discovered that 100 years of studies based on incorrect assumptions will have to be rewritten:

A new study by scientists from Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection Agency showed — much to the surprise of the researchers — that soil clings tenaciously to the first precipitation after a dry summer, and holds it so tightly that it almost never mixes with other water.

The finding is so significant, researchers said, that they aren’t even sure yet what it may mean. But it could affect our understanding of how pollutants move through soils, how nutrients get transported from soils to streams, how streams function and even how vegetation might respond to climate change.

…”We used to believe that when new precipitation entered the soil, it mixed well with other water and eventually moved to streams. We just found out that isn’t true.”"This could have enormous implications for our understanding of watershed function,” he said. “It challenges about 100 years of conventional thinking.”

One might have thought that something as close to home as soil hydrology would be well understood by now. Findings like this illustrate that many scientific surprises lie in store, even in very well-established fields.

The conventional thinking about conventional thinking should be that one might fruitfully expect it to be wrong. Scientists such as Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold made that their bread and butter, and while it often embroiled them in controversy, their greatest contributions were arguably made by rejecting the criteria of conservatism and standing the conventional theories on their heads. It’s not a surefire method - but as in the case of soil hydrology, it sure helps to consider that the conventional assumptions might be only, you know, assumptions.

Tests on stingrays reveal they are smart as shit, with tool use (manipulating water flow as tool) and other cognitive abilities.

It reveals that the fish, once thought a “simple reflex animal”, has cognitive abilities to rival birds, reptiles and mammals, scientists say.

… In the past, scientists have assumed that such cartilaginous fish have limited cognitive abilities, in part because they have been difficult to study, says Dr Michael Kuba from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel who undertook the latest study.

You got that? Because (in part) they were difficult to study, scientists assumed they had limited cognitive abilities. Absent any data whatsoever, the default scientific belief is that a given animal has limited cognitive abilities.

That illustrates nicely how anthropomorphism is underrated. Because the default belief of anthropomorphism is that well, any given animal is probably a lot like us. And time and time again, as in this case, it’s the anthropomorphic position that is correct, or at least, not surprised.

Terence McKenna on Novelty Theory part 1

Circa 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett said he’d found evidence of ancient cities in the Amazon jungle:

…he reported finding large earth mounds filled with ancient and brittle pottery. Buried under the jungle floor, he claimed, were also traces of causeways and roadways. Based on this and other evidence, he insisted that the Amazon once contained large populations and at least one, if not more, advanced civilizations. Despite being dismissed and ridiculed as a crank, he set off in 1925 to find the place, which he christened the “City of Z.” He and his party, including his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, then vanished forever—a fate that seemed to confirm the madness of such a quest.

Over the past several years, however, there has been mounting evidence that nearly everything that was once generally believed about the Amazon and its people was wrong, and that Fawcett was in fact prescient. When I followed Fawcett’s trail into the Xingu area of the Brazilian Amazon, in 2005, I met up with the archeologist Michael Heckenberger. In the very area where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z, Heckenberger and his team of researchers had discovered more than twenty pre-Columbian settlements. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 A.D., included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were geometrically-aligned causeways and roads, and plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west. According to Heckenberger, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

In your face!!

Saw this Wired article referenced on Kos:

When analyzing these quakes, she and her colleagues found that the mini-temblors were much more likely to occur at times when tidal stresses tended to shear the fault in the direction that it normally breaks — that is, when the Pacific tectonic plate is being pulled to the north-northwest relative to the North American tectonic plate, which lies to the east of the fault. In a sense, the added stress on a fault poised to slip acts like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

When tidal stresses act in the other direction and therefore tend to relieve stress on the fault, the frequency of small quakes drops substantially.

That’s a new wrinkle.

Now can we just move on and find Bigfoot please?

Article contains this tasty smackdown of the Hobbit skeptics:

“Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” noted Dr. Baab.

Oh snap!

Too static to cope with climate change-induced migration:

…Dr Bhagwat explained, the current system of having fixed nature reserves may need to be reconsidered.

“We have 12% of the Earth’s land surface covered in protected areas, but climate change is likely to push species out of their home ranges and out of reserves,” he added.

“So we need to look beyond reserves and create the conditions that allow the migration of species.”

Some good news in here about how coarse-grained studies “overestimate species risks,” but with the caveat that climate change is screwing things up and we’ll lose fewer species if we get out of the “nature reserve” mindset.

Nature: 0, Nurture: 1.

“Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.”

….Debbie Mills, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, said: “This is really interesting because it suggests that they are producing sounds they have heard in the womb and that means learning and that it is not an innate behaviour.”

Orthodox interpretations wrong again?! Is this Bizarro World?

This is over an hour long but worth it - recommended. Smith is the guy that New Scientist writer Michael Le Page referred to, in a comments section on this very blog, when he wrote:

“The actual examples all seem pretty dubious, to say the least, but let’s assume they are true for the sake of argument. If so, there is clearly a failure of the testing and regulatory system supposed to make sure GM food is safe - but this is not an argument against GM crops per se. You don’t ban all medical drugs because some turn out to be harmful, any more than you would ban all conventional crops because some turn out to be harmful (look up the lenape potato).

“As for the idea that GM is inherently dangerous, genetic studies have revealed that the genomes of all species are constantly being ‘genetically engineered’. Hundreds of mutations can occur in each new individual, jumping genes (transposons) can cause havoc, viruses insert foreign DNA all over the place, etc, etc. If you think these processes pose a risk to food safety then all crops need better safety testing, not just GM crops.”

Smith destroys Le Page’s arguments in this video.

Of course we’ve also done so ourselves.

Ten year study links cell phone use and brain tumors. But since this is impossible there’s no reason to even click the link.

Time travelling Higgs sabotages Large Hadron Collider

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers…

Of course they are getting a violent backlash from the rest of the scientific community. Man, when have I heard of this happening before? Oh yeah, all the freakin time.

Now I am not arguing the merit of the idea, I am pointing out the closed mindedness of the mainstream science death-by-firing-squad-to-new-ideas collective mentality. We need more people like this producing new ideas. Where would science be if some people hadn’t taken “crazy” leaps, withstanding harsh and sometimes violent criticism, and even ejection from the Church of Scientific Truth, where new ideas are burned at the stake.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Good for him! At least he is a respectable physicist putting this out there, which makes watching the immediate naysayers squirming all the more pleasant.

And finally,

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Word.

I must say, I am all for the LHC, because I have a strong hunch that it may reveal something outstanding that will humble, excite and drive forth more exploration into the unknown than we see right now. Blast to their predictions, lets see what this baby can do!

Pterosaur fossil “provides the first real evidence” for the “modular evolution” theory that whole groups of traits evolve at once - this would mean things evolve at a faster clip than if their traits changed one at a time.

It may be the first “real” evidence but we’ve been tracking the developing “fast evolution” story around here for a while (links to past fast evolution posts, incl. this one).

Fox news analyst comes off as in favor of the legalization of Cannabis? You fucking betcha.

I remember about a year ago, when in discussion regarding this topic, I said that we would be seeing legalization in about 3-5 years. Though I didn’t say it outright, I felt this to be a bit optimistic, but not unreal. Turns out I may have been more right than ever.

Here is a good piece recently from The Huffington Post about California’s move to put legalization on the ballot.

Oops. Turns out Massachussett’s might beat them to it with An Act to regulate and tax the Cannabis industry.

For the first time, a building block of proteins — and hence of life as we know it — has been found in a comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

Some paradigms shift gradually, others catastrophically. Anyhoo, here’s the link.

[originally published in the Zenith City Weekly]

The scientific method includes the principle that expert testimony outweighs non-expert testimony. This ideal is rigorously adhered to until the testimony of the expert deviates from the scientific orthodoxy. In that case the expert becomes a heretic and is shut out of the entire enterprise. The following examples are intriguing case studies of experts who were cut loose for the crime of scientific apostasy. The scientific establishment thus protects itself, and the public, from experts gone wild.

Halton Arp

Halton Arp, a Ph.D., worked his way to the top of his field, was repeatedly recognized as a senior scientist, and awarded distinguished prizes. For a while he was president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific - a company man. Most importantly he authored the renowned astronomers’ tome, the , later publishing a sequel covering the southern hemisphere. It is through these works that Arp became the expert on “peculiar” or unusual galaxies of any sort, and he consequently became an important voice on the subject of galaxy formation, which is a critical issue for understanding the Big Bang. Essentially no one had achieved his knowledge of galactic morphology and hence their origins. These topics are central to answering the questions surrounding the origin of the universe.

If you had something you had to know about the evolution of galaxies, you would have been smart to ask Arp, but he would have told you that his findings uncomfortably contradicted the status quo. Arp was lauded until he began publically recanting the Big Bang theory. Based on his literally encyclopedic observations of anomalous galaxies - he wrote the book! - Arp dared assert that the theorists had it all wrong. From the facts he could deduce about galaxies and their life cycles, based on his award-studded lifetime of professional training and expertise, Arp simply could not make his data conform to the needs of the Big Bang theory.

Arp was in an ideal position to see that theories of galactic formation had gone drastically wrong. The scientific method (as codified in the “criteria of adequacy”) demands that we give Arp’s testimony a lot of weight, as opposed to those who do not know as intimately what they are talking about, which is . But instead of remaining an experienced, trusted expert in his field, Arp’s telescope time was cancelled by a committee and he was cut loose as a pariah. His work remains the antidote to all the “dark matter” and “dark energy” bullshit one hears so much about.

Tom Van Flandern

The late Tom Van Flandern’s expertise was in the physics of the solar system, namely the intricate orbital dynamics of the sun, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Van Flandern knew as much as anyone on earth about the operation of the workings of the solar system. His scientific credentials were as big as a house; a mathematician who got his Ph.D. from Yale in Celestial Mechanics (the mathematical certainties of the solar system as expressed through the physics of orbiting bodies). With this skill set he worked for 23 years with the U.S. Naval Observatory, predicting eclipses and other celestial events with pinpoint accuracy. At a certain juncture, after it became obvious to him that asteroids commonly had orbiting moons of their own, he realized that the history of the solar system was different than the canonical establishment version. With a Ph.D. in Celestial Mechanics from Yale he bloody well knew the physics involved, and one thing he knew for sure was that asteroids will almost never just “capture” a moon. The only plausible origin of asteroidal moons is if a larger body explodes, then the pieces will orbit each other. Van Flandern was essentially resurrecting the exploded planet theory of the origin of the asteroids, long idle in the dustbin of history in the absence of confirming evidence. Now he had the evidence in the form of the asteroidal moons. After all those years of working within the establishment, Van Flandern went public with his heresy. His expertise had led him to rewrite the history of the solar system, and like Arp he was promptly shut out of the journals and conferences, a scientific death sentence.

Interview with Richard Hoagland about the secret history of NASA. Hoagland is a controversial figure to put it mildly. To the skeptics he’s a nutbar. We enjoy evaluating wild claims.

Gonzo Science mourns the loss of another titan of science:

Brian was a scientist well ahead of his time. He pioneered theoretical biology, structuralism, complexity theory, holistic and Goethean science, inspiring generations of students and colleagues across the disciplines to ask the big questions and always to think beyond received wisdom.

It was my great privilege to study with Brian Goodwin at Schumacher College. He was one of my heroes.

As the popularity of salvia has risen over the past 16 years—its psychoactive properties were discovered in 1993 by Daniel Siebert, an independent ethnobotanist based in Malibu, Calif.—calls to treat the plant as an illegal drug have grown louder. Twelve states have recently placed S. divinorum in their most restrictive controlled substance category, and four others have laws restricting sales. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has listed salvia as “a drug of concern” and is looking into the drug to determine whether it should be declared a Schedule I controlled substance, on par with heroin and LSD.

The unusual properties of salvinorin A intrigue scientists. Psychiatric researcher Bruce Cohen and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have been developing analogues of salvinorin A and studying their possible mood-modulating properties. The team’s work with salvinorin A in animals suggests “that a drug that would block kappa opioid receptors might be an antidepressant drug—probably a nonaddictive one—or a mood stabilizer for patients with bipolar disorder,” Cohen remarks. By activating the kappa opioid receptors, drugs such as salvinorin A could reduce dependence on stimulants and the mood-elevating and mood-rewarding effects of cocaine. Because salvinorin A can produce distortions of thinking and perception, researchers speculate that blocking the receptors might alleviate some symptoms of psychoses and dissociative disorders.

Some investigators, including the team at Harvard, believe that modified forms of salvinorin A could bolster its medicinal value. Tom Prisinzano, a medicinal chemist at the University of Kansas, points out that some chemical transformations of salvinorin A have different pharmacological abilities—such as a longer-lasting action or an enhanced ability to bind to receptors—and no hallucinogenic properties. Modifying its novel structure, he says, “could potentially treat a number of different central nervous system disorders.”

But if salvinorin A becomes a federally scheduled drug, research on it would become “much more difficult,” predicts Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit based in Santa Cruz, ­Calif.

Full story from Scientific American.

One commenter on the Salvia story had this to say-

What about the experience with other drugs of abuse such as, indeed, LSD?  Studies WERE done on them, and they didn’t result in the production of any useful medications.  What REASON is there to think this would be any different?

In response, let’s ponder this story about contemporary LSD research.

In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a “black mat” of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an airburst. The controversial theory also gibes with the 1908 Tunguska atmospheric detonation (also thought to be from a comet or meteorite) that leveled trees in Siberia, and it echoes the extraterrestrial impact widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Today, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same team reports on shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds, known only from meteorite and other impact events, in a soot layer from Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in California. The canyon is famous for containing the earliest human remains in North America, dating back to 13,000 years, and the soot layer coincides with the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth from the island. In a documentary shown earlier this year on the Public Broadcasting Service’s NOVA science show, the team also claimed that they discovered similar diamonds from the Greenland Ice Sheet dating to the same period.

The skeptics are not amused.

This guy’s throwing the gauntlet down - he’s just found the oldest dinosaur burrow, pushing that timeline back 15 million years, and he’s not so much predicting as wildly speculating, but still:

“Right now burrowing dinosaurs might look like an exception to the rule,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if more species [dug burrows]. Ten years from now it might be considered commonplace.”

We’ll check back. My guess: he’s right.

 New Scientist catches up with cold-fusion pariah Martin Fleischmann.

MARTIN FLEISCHMANN can still remember the morning he entered his lab and saw the terrific hole in the workbench. It was about the size of a dinner plate. Beneath, nestled in a shallow crater in the concrete floor, were the remains of a chemistry experiment that had been fizzing idly for several months without incident. “It had obliterated itself!” he recalls.

It happened overnight, so no one witnessed the meltdown that took place in a basement lab at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1985. But for Fleischmann and his longtime colleague Stanley Pons, there could be only one cause: room-temperature or “cold” fusion. If they were right, the chemists had made a reaction that nuclear physicists had thought next to impossible, one that potentially held the key to almost limitless clean energy. Yet four years later, and just weeks after they had announced their discovery at a now infamous press conference on 23 March 1989, their work was dismissed from mainstream science. Cold fusion became a pariah field, and Fleischmann and Pons fell under the shadow of disrepute.

At his home near Salisbury, UK, 82-year-old Fleischmann looks too beaten to entertain suggestions that, after two decades, cold fusion might actually be gaining acceptance. He has Parkinson’s disease, and although he still speaks in his usual measured phrases and Czech accent, he is slow and often loses his train of thought. “All my activities are devoted to giving up,” he laughs, glancing at his coffee cup performing another involuntary rattle on its saucer.

Poor bastard.

At first the modern rise of Wheat Gluten Disorder was largely written off as a statistical quirk/function of improved diagnosis. A Minnesota study of blood from the 1950s has seemingly disproved that theory. Whaddaya know there might be an environmental cause (like changes in diet duh) that makes people’s guts freak out when they eat gluten - a wheat-based substance that is now more than ever, everywhere in processed foods, which are of course largely ubiquitos. Well at least that’s settled. Prediction: it’s not settled.